After years of captivity, this amazing teenager still had instinct to flee

SHE ran. That’s the marvellous thing. She ran. He told her to vacuum his car.

As she started, a phone call came through to him. The noise of the cleaner forced him to move away from the car to hear the caller. And the girl ran.

The miracle is that she still had the instinct to escape, after eight years in captivity. When she was 10 years old, Austrian Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped as she walked to school by a man more than three times her age. From then on, she was his possession, spending eight years in a cell he had created in advance of the abduction.

Her adolescent years were squeezed down to contact with one person: her perverted jailor. She must have been terrified every time he left the house: a car crash or an illness that happened to him would leave her to die slowly and painfully of thirst and hunger.

She must have felt lost and abandoned. He took her from her family at a time when children believe their parents to be, if not all powerful, at least fairly powerful — yet her parents never appeared, never rescued her.

When she watched television programmes with her captor in recent years, she saw nothing about herself.

Nothing. Not a mention.

There was no rhyme or reason to her world. The man threatened that if she ever escaped, he would do dreadful things to her family. But then he’d be kind to her. Bring her a video. Buy her a book. Teach her.

In that split second when she realised he wasn’t paying attention to her, none of those confusing factors held her back. Skinny and unfit and soapy-white with prison-pallor, she saw her chance and took it. She ran.

Her jailer got in his big fast impressive Beamer and drove through the city streets, hunting her. When he failed to track her down, he knew he was headed for court, for prison and for years of solitude because of the need to protect him from ‘ordinary decent criminals’ who traditionally hate convicts who interfere with children. So he threw himself in front of an express train.

Natascha Kampusch was reunited with her family after a gap of eight years.

She then did something sensible. She ran from media, too. Although described as ‘very together’ by her relatives, she nonetheless wasn’t up to facing a battery of cameras and microphones. Clever girl. Let’s hope her family encourage her in media-avoidance.

Media will want her as a circus act: “Listen to her, she uses adult phraseology to express essentially childish thoughts.” They will want her as a scientific curiosity, because she is likely to be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, the condition which causes hostages to become attached to their captors.

They will want her as a freak, who is nine inches taller than when she was abducted, but six pounds lighter — after eight years. They will want her for the human interest she delivers through her first requests (chocolate and a mobile phone) and her account of her victimhood.

None of which is media’s fault. It’s the nature of the beast.

Since human beings began to tell stories, the legend of the lost child has haunted every culture. The child stolen by the gypsies or the fairies, who sometimes left a substitute, a changeling, in its place. The royal child (the Dauphin or the Tsarevich) suddenly removed from their world of satin, velvet and fawning flunkies, and cast into a world of contempt, of body lice, of starvation and anonymity. The child lost in the tempest and rescued by wild animals — Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were supposed to have been suckled by a she-wolf. The abandoned child reared by apes — in relatively recent times, Edgar Rice Burroughs made a lot of money, first in print and later in film, telling the tale of Tarzan of the Apes, a fictional account of what had happened, very occasionally, in real life.

THE world has always been intrigued by the feral child — the child raised by wild animals. Similarly, the world has always been intrigued by missing years, where, through illness or poison or accident or supernatural intervention, a human goes to sleep or disappears for decades. Rip van Winkle nods off in a cave and slumbers his way to old age, waking up in a world he doesn’t recognise. Oisín goes to Tír na nÓg, where everybody stays young forever, but makes the mistake, on a nostalgic visit home, of touching the ground of Ireland, which turns him instantly into an old man.

The 18-year-old Austrian’s story combines key aspects of all of these myths. It’s as interesting, but more significant than the modern Robinson Crusoe portrayed by Tom Hanks in the movie where he gets stranded on a desert island with only a volleyball for company. The key difference isn’t the desert island location. The key difference is that Hanks and the genuine castaway on whom Daniel Defoe based the original Robinson Crusoe story were adults when torn from their world. They had skills. They had heads filled with poetry and prayers, facts and rules. They had ways to measure time and distance, to assess their own health, ensure their own survival — up to a point.

The same can be said of Albert Speer, Hitler’s organisation man. When he was convicted at the Nuremberg Trials and sent to Spandau prison along with other Nazis serving shorter sentences and Rudolph Hess, who was serving a longer one and daft as a brush to boot, Speer wrote his memoirs, paragraph by paragraph, and had them smuggled out of the prison. Then he measured out the garden within Spandau’s walls and set out to “walk the world” by covering a set number of miles each day and imagining the places to which those miles would take him, outside the prison.

Kampusch, in contrast, was a child. When she was torn from her normal life, she was 10 years old, with neither skills, nor rules, nor the inner resources to cope with what happened to her. Yet, instinctively, she tapped into the same mechanisms which have allowed isolated adults to survive. She drew comfort from routine tasks and she wrote a diary regularly.

The diary gave her a history and a means of knowing who she was, in the absence of feedback from parents, siblings, teachers and friends. It gave her discipline and pride. It gave her a friend, just as Anne Frank, the little Jewish girl whose family hid in a secret annex in Holland during the second world war, found a friend and a means of understanding the inexplicable, through writing her own diary.

Now, Natascha Kampusch is the point at which her need for normality and our need to learn more about her collide. The chances are that, given her resourcefulness and resilience, she will, like some other children deprived of contact, affection and education, fast-forward her own development.

If she’s left alone.

If she’s not further victimised by the public fascination with her victimhood.